It has been widely reported today that schools could potentially remain shut until after the easter holiday.
Two weeks into the third national lockdown (the second of which schools are shut) and fears are growing that they remain closed until April.
Steve Chalke, head of the Oasis Academy Trust who run 48 schools across the country, said: “I don’t think schools will reopen until post Easter. I think they will miss the second half of term as well.
“That is the mood music internally.”
Speaking at the coronavirus briefing on Monday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said of schools reopening in March:“We’ve got to watch the data and the Prime Minister, when he brought in the national lockdown, set out four considerations.
“We’ve got to see the number of deaths coming down and, sadly, we haven’t seen that yet, we need to clearly see the pressure on the NHS reducing and, as you’ve just heard from Professor Powis, we are not seeing that yet.
“We must see the vaccination programme working and the rollout is going really well, so that is clearly on track but it’s still got a massive effort, and we need to see the efficacy of the vaccine working in practice saving lives, which we know that it will from the clinical trials but I want to see that actually happening on the ground.
“The fourth consideration is that there isn’t some other new variant in the same way that in December we discovered the new variant that caused so many difficulties and meant that the old three-tiered system ceased to work.
“We monitor all the time for new variants and, as you know, we’ve taken very significant and rapid action to protect Britain from new variants that are spotted overseas.”
